


Loose Ends

by aspermoth



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Azkaban, Canon - Movie, Dark, Disturbing Themes, Escape, Explicit Language, Gen, Nausea Fuel, Post - Goblet of Fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-28 16:36:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aspermoth/pseuds/aspermoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some loose ends just have to be tied. Barty Crouch Junior is just one of these. After all, what did happen to him after he was captured at Hogwarts?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loose Ends

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Loose Ends — Недосказанное](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11785767) by [Synant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synant/pseuds/Synant)



All things considered, there were several other places that Barty Crouch Junior would have preferred to be over the corridors of Azkaban prison. Sitting at the side of his revived Master was, of course, at the top of the list. Still hiding in Hogwarts in disguise was also fairly high, as was dancing on his father's grave. Azkaban, on the other hand, had such a low score on his mental list of "Places I'd Like To Be" that it was almost in negative numbers. He had bad memories of Azkaban.

Very bad memories.

There were two Aurors accompanying him, one wearing hooded robes that concealed both face and gender, and the other – a middle-aged man with prematurely grey hair – wearing his hood down. The latter kept throwing him dark looks and tugging on his arm at unnecessary points just to throw him off balance.

His hands were charmed behind him. His wand was gone. And at least one of his guards openly despised him. All in all, things weren't going very well.

"Barty!"

The voice – one he recognised – came from up ahead, and a face appeared at the opening in the door, emerging from the darkness as though emerging from water. Bellatrix Lestrange.

"Bella."

"Did you find him?" she gasped, her eyes burning. "Did you find the Dark Lord? Well he return?"

Barty's tongue flicked over his lips and he grinned.

"He already has, Bella. He's back. The Dark Lord is back."

One of the Aurors – the one without a hood – cuffed him round the head and they both dragged him on faster. He struggled, twisting his head so that he could still see her.

"He will come for us!" he screamed. "He will come for us! We were faithful! _We were faithful_!"

" _Silencio_ ," muttered the Auror who'd hit him.

Barty's screams fell silent. He tried to swear: no sound came out, so he instead gave the Auror a very dirty look that the man completely ignored. Bella's face faded back into the darkness and they turned the corner. Straight ahead was an empty cell. His cell.

The tip of a wand dug into the flesh beneath his lower jaw and Barty licked his lips nervously.

"I could kill you right now," the Auror murmured. "I knew Frank and Alice, you bastard. And now a teenage boy? Now _Harry Potter_? You're a sick fuck and you _deserve_ to die. What do you say to that? Vox."

His voice returned to him, Barty swallowed and grinned darkly.

"Just try it," he hissed. "You'll be the first the Dark Lord comes for."

The Auror snarled and pushed the wand harder against Barty's flesh and he winced.

" _Avada_ -" he stuttered. " _Avada Ke_ -"

"Can't do it, can you? You can't kill me. You haven't got the _guts_."

The Auror swore violently. " _Petrificus Totalus_!"

His whole body went rigid and he fell backwards stiff as a board, his head cracking on the floor. White stars exploded across his vision but they quickly passed into a sick, thumping headache that was quickly joined by a kick to the stomach.

"Stop that," snapped the other Auror, a woman from the sound of things. "He's not worth getting the trouble."

"But just think of what he's done!"

"The Dementors can have him. Now stun him and unfreeze him – he'll be impossible to move rigid."

" _Fine_ ," the male Auror spat with remarkable venom. " _Stupefy_."

Everything went mercifully black.

It seemed that only a second later he was awake, mobile, and completely alone, lying in the middle of his cell. He sat up, pushed himself back into a wall, pressed his body into the corner and whimpered. His head throbbed, his arms ached from struggling, and he felt dizzy and cold. So cold. Dementors. He hated Dementors. They made him _think_ of things. They made him _feel_ things.

They made him _remember_ things.

 _His father denouncing him in front of the entire Wizengamot, "You are no son of mine", failing to escape, brought down by that worm Karkaroff..._

No. Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Focus on happy thoughts.

 _There is no happiness here._

But there was one thought that not even the Dementors could suck out of him: the thought that whilst he sat here, rotting, the Dark Lord had no follower he could rely on, no follower he could trust, no follower who was as diligent and loyal as he. Only that wretch Wormtail.

To hell with Azkaban. He was getting out of here.

There was a contingency plan. Of course there was. You didn't get to be as powerful and marvellous as the Dark Lord without a back-up plan. In this case, it was a potion, modelled on the Draught of Living Death, so potent as to suppress all signs of life – keeping breathing and the heart beat so low as to be undetectable even with magic – and yet temporary, so that he who took the potion would return to full mobility after a set period of time. Say, after being declared dead by the Azkaban medical officers but before being buried.

In other words, it was exactly what Barty needed.

And all he needed was a drop: small enough to hide where the Aurors and Dementors would not find it. Small enough to fit inside a tooth. His tongue flicked over his dry, cold lips and shuddered. This was going to hurt.

The tooth was looser for having been removed, hollowed out, filled with a potion and then replaced, but it was by no means easy to extract. He pinched it tight between forefinger and thumb, fingertips slipping on the moist surface, and pressed down and in towards the roof of his mouth. With a sharp tugging stab of pain and a sick wet noise, it shifted loose and bent inwards but still clung determinedly to the gum, anchored by a string of something bloody and living. His fingers slipped from his mouth; his jaw snapped shut involuntarily; and the loose tooth crunched between the others. He moaned and pressed his head back against the wall. The pain would pass. He would endure. He would do this for the Dark Lord.

But the entire right side of his mouth throbbed and pounded and Merlin's Beard it hurt, _it hurt_. The kind of hurt that made you want to curl up in a ball and scream for your mother. _But his mother was dead and gone and he was all alone in a cell guarded by monsters._

No. Don't think like that. Think of the Dark Lord, surrounded by bumbling fools, without a devoted servant like Barty. Get the tooth. Get the potion. Get out of here.

He felt for the tooth that dangled from his gum and pinched it tight once more. He took a deep breath. He pulled.

The little living thread holding the tooth to his gum snapped. Barty screamed and dropped his prize, his whole body curling in on itself as he pressed his shaking hands so tight against his jaw that his fingers turned white. The taste of blood filled his mouth, thick and coppery and nauseating. He fought the agony and the urge to vomit, taking deep, shuddering breaths until the heavy pulses of pain that came and went with his heartbeat died down to gentle waves breaking against his consciousness.

Nobody came running, of course. Nobody came to check on him. Nobody arrived to see the once promising young wizard curled up in the corner, face creased with suffering and blood dripping from his lips. This was Azkaban: screaming was par for the course.

When Barty had reached the point where the pain was bearable, he slowly uncurled his body, spat out a mouthful of blood, and – with hands that trembled like an old man's – retrieved the tooth from the floor. There was a charm on it that prevented it from releasing its precious contents until he pulled it out of his jaw and whispered the incantation. After that, it was a small matter of drinking the potion and waiting to be found. Just like last time.

The wizard wardens checked on them morning, noon and night. All he had to do was wait until the morning check, take the potion, and wait to be discovered "dead". Oh a little acting was due, but pretending to be a broken man was not so hard as it seemed. It was easy enough to do.

One night in this place. Just one night, sleeping in a prison where the guards themselves created the nightmares you dreamt by pulling them from the deepest, darkest places inside of your mind.

And Barty tried to ignore the biting cold and the wet, slimy feeling in the back of his head that said that all the joy was gone from the world and nothing would ever be good or happy again. He tried to focus on the thoughts of rejoining his Lord, of escape, of the fake tooth he held hidden in his palm that would let him go. He even tried focussing on the throbbing pain in his jaw. But it was no use. It never was. It hadn't been during his last stay, either.

Eventually, the dark thoughts bubbled up and consumed his mind: he screamed himself to sleep. Just like all the others.

The morning came eventually. It had to. And with it came the realisation for Barty that soon he would be leaving, soon he would be getting _out_ of this hell-hole and back to his Lord, and that was a thought that he clung to desperately like a Quidditch player clings to his broomstick. Slowly, painfully, he uncurled from the foetal position he'd assumed and got to his feet, stretching the tight, painful muscles in his arms and legs. There was a coppery taste in his mouth, both from the missing tooth and from where he'd somehow bitten his lips bloody during the night. It wasn't uncommon. It had happened to him often, last time. Most people hurt themselves during the night here, in their sleep, without even realising it. Some even swallowed their tongues.

He was glad he hadn't. The only way a dead man can serve his master was as one of the Inferi and he would make sweet gentle love to Wormtail before he would become one of those... _things_.

A sound. Footsteps, up the corridor. The inspectors were coming. They had to come in to Azkaban three times a day to make their rounds, cleaning those who had gone insane and lost control of their functions, and checking for those who had died. Dementors were all very well for destroying people's minds, sucking out souls and preventing escapes, for the most part, but when it came to detecting and dealing with corpses, they were useless. It was like they couldn't even sense somebody without a soul, like it was invisible to them. Either that or they just plain didn't know what to do with a corpse without human guidance. One of the two.

Barty ran his fingers through his hair a few times to make sure he looked suitably dishevelled, dragged his fingernails across the flesh of his cheeks until he was reasonably sure they had broken the skin, and licked his lips lightly to wet the blood to fresh redness. Then he lay back down in his corner and curled up into a ball again, affecting a wide eyed, terrified stare, the perfect image of a broken man.

He didn't have long to wait. The hatch in his door screeched open and a voice – the voice of the male Auror from the day before, the one who'd tried and failed to kill him – came drifting through, as pleasing to the ear as fingernails on a chalk board.

"Still alive, you bastard? Still feeling cocky?"

Barty said nothing, resisting the urge to tell the Auror exactly where he could stick his wand. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut, concentrating on the cold, dark place at the back of his head, letting it spread through his thoughts like poison through his veins, and started shaking. Bad things were flickering across his eyelids like moving portraits. Just... _bad_ things. Things that made him whimper shamefully. He heard the Auror laugh at that.

"Thought not. Hope you die in there, Crouch. I hope you die _screaming_."

The hatch screeched shut and footsteps faded into the distance as the Auror moved on to the next cell. Barty forced his eyes opened and took a deep, shuddering breath. Forget the bad things, he told himself. Think of the Dark Lord, of returning to him, of serving him once more. You are going to get out of here. You are going to get _out_ of here.

He lifted the tooth to his mouth, whispered two words under his breath – " _Solvo dens_ " – before slipping it between his lips.

The hard enamel melted away in moments to the smallest drop of potion that tasted like the memory of a mourner's tears on his tongue: slightly salty, cold, empty. He felt it begin to spread through his body, a deliciousness numbness very closer to death that slowed his breaths, stilled his heart, immobilised his limbs and dulled his mind. With a last gentle sigh of relief, Barty closed his eyes and let himself succumb to its relaxing powers, although he forced himself to stay conscious. He needed to know his plan was working.

Vaguely, as though through a veil of mist, he sensed what was going on around him. The hours passed. An Auror came for the noon check-up, found him silent and unmoving, and came in to check on him. No pulse, of course; no breathing; no signs of life. Being levitated to the morgue felt like part of a dream. And although when they declared him officially dead, a spike of pleasure leapt through his system, he was struggling to stay focussed. It felt different from the last time. It felt wrong. Too soft, too muddled, too _numb_... He couldn't stay clear... just... couldn't...

And his mind slipped into silence.

When Barty opened his eyes, he was lying on his back on a hard, unforgiving surface in a place that was dark and cold. He tried to move his arms, to push himself up, to stand, but his limbs refused to obey. Nothing below his neck seemed to work. This was wrong. The potion should wear off all parts of his body at once.

Where was he? He didn't know. He couldn't see a thing, couldn't move. But somewhere above him, he could hear sounds. Crunching sounds.

 _Digging_ sounds.

He'd been buried alive.

The idea flashed through his brain like a lightning bolt, and he was just about to scream when – with the sound of screeching wood and nails – the ceiling above him was lifted free to reveal a neat rectangle of starry sky with two familiar faces looking down at him: one simultaneously both podgy and pointy with protruding teeth – Wormtail – and the other...

Oh, the other. Pale skin. Cold eyes. Snake-like slits for a nose. And a icy smile.

The Dark Lord himself.

When Barty spoke, his voice was hoarse and strangled.

"Master," he whispered. "You came for me. I knew you would."

Wormtail sniggered and glanced up at the Dark Lord. And the Dark Lord's eyes narrowed and his smile thinned to a razor-sharp line.

"My Lord?"

"You have disappointed me, Bartemius. You, my most faithful, have failed me."

"M-my Lord, I have done nothing but serve you. I – I did all you asked of me. I gave you Harry Potter!"

"And you have outlived your usefulness, Bartemius," the Dark Lord hissed. "And I see no more fitting death than the one you have brought upon yourself."

"My Lord, please – I want nothing but to be at your side. Please – m-my Lord – please!"

The Dark Lord ignored his pleas and stood straight, his face fading away into the stars above, but his voice was as clear and sharp as a needle.

"Bury him, Wormtail."

"No! My Lord! My Lord!"

But the Dark Lord was gone. Wormtail looked back down at him and grinned nastily. Then the stars vanished. The coffin lid slowly descended. Nails were magically replaced. Then earth began to fall onto its surface with rhythmic pattering thuds as Wormtail began to bury him alive.

And that was when he finally began to scream.

*

Geoffrey Vance was in a foul mood, but that in itself was not a rare occurrence. He'd learnt to hate being on Azkaban duty. There were benefits, of course – it was only for a fortnight, and you got time and a half plus a daily bar of chocolate to combat the worst effects of the Dementors – but the next time he was offered it, he was going to pass it up. Nothing was worth being around those... things. And it wasn't just the Dementors. The _people_ in there...

He'd been here for eight days now. And on his first bloody day he'd had to escort Barty Crouch Junior, of all people, to his cell. He _knew_ Frank and Alice Longbottom. They were friends with his sister Emmeline. And that... that _animal_... what he'd done to them...

Well. The only reason he hadn't killed the bastard where he stood was that he couldn't afford to end up in Azkaban himself. Angeline – his wife – had just given birth to their first child. He couldn't leave her alone.

Just six more days. Then he would never have to set foot in Azkaban again as long as he lived.

Geoffrey sighed and slugged down the last few mouthfuls of his almost scaldingly hot cup of tea. It was almost noon. Time to go and check on his section of the building and remove anybody who'd swallowed their tongue for burial. He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and made his way out of the Auror break-room and into the halls of Azkaban.

The chill of the Dementors hit him straight away, like plunging into an ice cold bath, and it took his breath away. Ugh, he hated it here. Hated, hated, _hated_ it. He hated Dementors, he hated removing corpses, he hated _everything_ about this place.

The first room was less than a five minute walk away. Geoffrey stood on tip toes, pulled the heavy iron hatch open with a screech of reluctant metal, and peered inside.

The man inside, lying on his back on the floor, was hardly recognisable as a living human being. He was gaunt, emaciated, his stubbled cheeks hollow and his lips bitten to bloody tatters. His eyes were closed. He was very still. He always was. Never moved. Hardly spoke. Never ate or drank. At death's door. But he was still breathing for now. Geoffrey could see his chest moving slowly up and down beneath the robes that hung from his skeletal frame like an old sack.

Geoffrey poked his wand through the hatch and muttered a quick cleaning charm. And as he did, the prisoner's eyes snapped open. The dry, scabbed lips moved and Geoffrey heard him speak, his voice almost tearing his throat.

"Master. You came for me. I knew you would."

There was a pause. A moment's silence. The prisoner's eyes widened and he began to rave at somebody only he could see, begging and pleading.

Serve him right, Geoffrey thought, and he slammed the hatch shut and walked on down the corridor to the next cell.

He left Barty Crouch Junior to his screaming, and his madness.


End file.
